Having a Conversation about Israel

Midway through last week, I sat at the kitchen table with my boys.

That very day, my denomination was in the throes of some really tough decision-making about disengaging from businesses profiting from the peculiar military/correctional mess in Gaza and the West Bank.  I'd pitched in my two cents here on the blog, and I felt the need to sound my perspective off my boys.  It was just the three of us, as my wife had gone with my mother-in-law to sit shiva that evening with the family of the rabbi of our synagogue, who'd lost his father.

So that night it was Presbyterian pastor dad at table, having a dinner meal with his Jewish sons.

There are plenty of calls to have conversations to rebuild relationships between the Jewish community following the General Assembly, and I'm obviously in an unusual position to have such a conversation.  Judaism isn't just an abstract community for me, folks I know from meetings and gatherings.  It's not just that I "have Jewish friends."

It's the woman that I love.  It's the flesh and the blood of our children.

We chose, early on, not to do the half-and-half thing.  They would be raised Jewish.  Period.  And so, having made that nontrivial decision, I've had a nontrivial hand in their Jewish upbringing.  I found the mohel and made the arrangements for their brises.  I schlepped them for years to synagogue for Hebrew School, through the worst traffic in the United States.  I stood with them on the bema, and watched proudly as they were mitzvahed.

So I started in, asking them for their perspective.

Here's what we might be doing and why, I told them, laying it out as objectively as I could.  Here are the three American corporations we would no longer be investing church resources in, here are the specific products and services they are providing, and here is why we feel we can't be part of that.

What do you think?  Are we being unfair?  Is my church picking on Israel, or being anti-Semitic?

At sixteen and thirteen, neither of my sons are particularly shy about telling their father when they think he's being an idiot.  Believe me.  Not. Shy. At. All.   God help me.

My thirteen year old piped up first.  "Not even close," he said.  "Not everything that Israel does is right.  Why would you have to agree with everything they do?  Why would I?"  And then, because he is every once in a while prone to *cough* vigorously expressing his opinion, he went into a schpiel about how weird he thought it was that a Jewish state should have a large ethnic community within its borders that are unwillingly walled in.

"You know what that is," he opined after describing the West Bank and Gaza, gesticulating and raising his voice.  "You know what you call that?  You call that a ghetto.  It's a freakin' ghetto.  It's like Israel is turning into the freakin' Nazis.  If anyone should know better than that, it's we Jews.  Why is Israel acting like a bunch of freakin' Nazis?"

My older son, more inward, more measured, was a little more circumspect.  "That's not really a fair description.  What Israel is doing is not good, sure.  But it's not like the Holocaust.  They aren't being systematically slaughtered.  Israel's not like the Nazis.  It's just not the same."  He thought for a moment.

"It's more like what America did to the Native Americans.  It's like they've been kicked off their land and forced to live on reservations.  Israel isn't getting all Nazi with the Palestinians.  They're getting American on them."

There was more back and forth, with some of the heat and debate that always comes when my sons get into something, but after surprisingly little bickering, both agreed:

Israel is just being like America in one of her less proud moments, and it does not look good, and it was not anti-Israel or anti-Jewish to both point that out and to choose not to validate it.

And then they were off, disappearing into their rooms and their screens.

It was an interesting talk.

Zionism Unsettled

The other day, I wended my way through rush hour traffic to get to a small church gathering that ended up not happening.

It was unfortunate, but a reality of the hurly burly of Washington existence.  It's just hard to get people to travel across the mess of traffic to get anywhere.  We've got a bazillion things to do, and we can't do it all.  This is why I don't even try to do it all.  Just the important stuff.

But the important stuff can get lost in the thickets of busyness.  We can be so intent on our doing that we forget to prioritize, or lose a sense of who we are becoming.  Relationships, those relationships that matter, have been neglected, have withered, and are no more.  We wake up, and we realize our children have grown, and we were so busy rushing around in a panic that we lost track of them.  From far away, they ignore us right back, just like we taught them.

Or we suddenly realize that our relationship with our spouse is a dead thing, suffocated under a mound of meetings and memos and the resentments that arise from functional abandonment.

The meeting in question had to do with Zionism Unsettled, a report from an affinity group of the Presbyterian Church (USA), one that will go before our General Assembly this summer.  It's an effort to speak to the seemingly intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people, which in and of itself is a worthy thing.

It's a mess, a level-five conflict, one with as many layers and tears as an onion.  In it, there is no question that Israel, a democracy, fears for its existence with legitimate cause.  There are some really unpleasant powers in the region that seek to do the Jewish people ill, that 1) use the Palestinian people as a proxy and 2) use that conflict as a distraction as they oppress their own people.

On the other hand, Netanyahu, Likud, and the Israeli far-right have only deepened the conflict.  Their radical nationalism and focus on security above human rights have generated some very real abuses of the Palestinian people.  Their aggressive policy of settlement expansion has also--to my eyes, at least--rendered the "two-state solution" unviable.  I do not believe that the current scattered assemblage of non-contiguous Palestinian ghettos can be woven into a nation.

Into this mess, a group of justice-oriented Presbyterians have attempted to speak.  The challenge with speaking, though, is finding the right tone.   It is our right to notice injustice, and our duty to say something.  But if we say the wrong thing, it will be actively counterproductive.  Say the right thing in the wrong way, and it will also be actively counterproductive.

I am convinced that if the Presbyterian church has a hand in the solution to this issue, it does not lie in our wealth, our political influence, or our numbers.  It has to do with our relationships.  In particular, it lies in our connections the American Jewish community, with whom we have constructively engaged for two generations.  Jews in the United States are committed to justice and democracy, and are supportive of Israel.  They can also speak to Israeli power with authority, in ways that Christians cannot.

In so far as we Presbyterians have influence to help restore justice in that region, it lies in our healthy relationship with the Jewish community here, and our capacity to open justice conversations.

Zionism Unsettled will damage that relationship.  It already has.  It is too easily heard as an attack on both the integrity and best aspirations of the Jewish people.  I do not believe it was intended that way, but having read the report, I can't help but hear it through the ears of progressive and justice-oriented Judaism, the sort of Judaism that defines the synagogue of which I--a Presbyterian pastor who has raised two Jewish boys--am a member.

It's going to be a bad thing.

Some will respond that this is only because Jews in America are hypersensitive to any statements about Israel. If you say anything with even a whiff of criticism of Israeli policies or politics, you are a hateful anti-Semite.  There's some truth in that, if we are honest.  Some folks go right to that button, every time.

But we also need to listen to ourselves, and to where our tone and language are taking us.  I think Presbyterians need to take seriously the folks who have weighed in supporting Zionism Unsettled.  If we endorse this report, we will have picked up a rather interesting group of fellow travelers.

Iranian state-run news media have picked our efforts up, and are lending their support.  Former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke has blogged admiringly of this report as a step in the right direction in the battle against the Zionist Occupation Government.  And on the website of Stormfront, the white power neo-Nazi movement in the United States, the chatter is that the Presbyterian Church is finally doing the right thing to drive Jewish influence out of America.

If active anti-Semites--delusional as they are--see this effort as supporting their aspirations, then we are doing it wrong, no matter what our intent may be.

The People Who Don't Wrestle

In the flutter of infotainment that flows by in an endless wash, one bit of data from last week stuck with me.  The decision of the IOC to drop wrestling from the lineup of Olympic sports seemed fraught with something, like one of those marker signals, a little flag,  a sad little yellow canary-carcass smudge at the bottom of a cage.

I never wrestled myself, although as sophomore in high school, I was asked if I wanted to.  I was small and naturally rail thin, in roughly the same weight class as Gollum.  I was good at it, but the rigors of practice would have gotten in the way of Lit Mag, school paper work, and pining after girls.    So I didn't.

Wrestling is an ancient sport, a primal sport, as old as recorded culture itself.   It was part of classical games in antiquity, meaning it's got cred and a deep history.  When modernity decided it might be a good thing to do a reboot of the Olympics, the inclusion of wrestling was a no-brainer.

But that was then.

Now, the Olympics are big business.   What matters is eyeballs and selling ad time, and wrestling?

Well, we're not talking the WWE here.

Real wrestling is physically demanding, intense, and focused.  But what it is not is flashy.  It's too tight, too tactical, too intimate.  Now, it must compete for permission to return to the Olympics.  But it's not big and OOOOH and powerboat leapy like wakeboarding.  It's inadequately telegenic, unlike the not-ancient Central-Committee-created-and-approved combat-useless weapon-dancing of wushu.

The Muckity Mucks Who Decide know this.  That is why they are not interested in wrestling.  It means nothing in their world.   If you're going to add value, and to maximize return, you want shine and sparkle so that you can entertain, and wrestling does not have this.  It is not marketable to the vast multinationals who are paying top yuan to put their product in front of the masses.

Physicality, intimacy, intensity, and a deep raw connection with the Other are not part of our market-driven lives.  The world as it is is not as it was.

But wrestling is what is always was.  It is dust and dirt, flesh on flesh, just as it was when Jacob wrestled in the darkness by the babbling Jabbok.  It is from wrestling that God's covenant people got their name, after all.  Yisrael.  The people who wrestle with God.

It's a pity we are in the process of forgetting this.  Wakeboard-A-El just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Israel, Iran, and Yearning for Cyrus

As things continue to trundle inexorably towards military conflict in the Middle East...again...the inevitability of war is desperately frustrating.   As we bumble along in our aimless way, distracted by Kardashians and kontraception and zombie melodrama, America isn't paying attention.   The question seems to be not if there will be a conflict, but when.

A significant war in the region would involve someone, likely a nuclear-neo-holocaust-haunted-Netanyahu, going big-time preemptive, followed by a semi-prolonged exchange of medium-range ballistic weaponry.  Tel Aviv and Tehran would burn, but I think it'd be more than than.

There's no love between Tehran and the Arab world.  Iranians are Persian, not Arab, after all.  They share the faith of much of the rest of the Arab world, but they do so in the same way that Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland shared Christianity in the latter half of the 20th century.   If a few Ghadr-110s and Shahab-3s found their way to the massive Yanbu refinery complex in Saudi Arabia, I wouldn't be surprised.   Four dollar a gallon gas will seem a bargain then, I'd suspect.

The way to defuse conflict between two parties is to find common ground or common interest, and that ain't easy in this one.  Iran isn't the most genial of nations lately, being unpleasantly prone to oppression and all the bad things that happen when faith uses the power of the state to enforce itself.  In the face of real existential threats, Israel has chosen for herself some highly aggressive far-right leadership.  On the one hand, you don't have to worry about Netanyahu being willing to go to war.  On the other, well, if war is the primary skillset of your leadership, then that's what you're likely to get.

Still and all, there is common ground.  You just have to go waaaay back to find it.  That common ground comes in the deep past, in the person and ethic of the greatest ruler of the Persian empire.   Cyrus the Great is a remarkable figure in world history.  He was an empire-builder who spread the influence of his people.  He was a warrior-king, who lead his armies into battle not from the confines of a desk, but on the battlefield itself.  What president or prime minister does that these days?  That's not what makes him most significant, though.   Warlords were a dime a dozen back when sword and bow and horse were the tools of the trade.

What made Cyrus the Great so great was that he was a remarkably gracious ruler.  He was, in the classical sense, a liberal.  His official policy towards other peoples was to tolerate their religious practices, to permit them great latitude in their cultures, and to be generous towards them.   His approach to other peoples was rather different than that of Ahmedinajad and the ayatollahs who rule Iran today.

But Persians haven't forgotten him over the millennia.  He's a significant part of their history.  One their oppressive leadership struggles with, particularly as he was likely a Zoroastrian.  But they can't forget him and maintain their identity as a people any more than we could forget Washington and maintain our identity as a nation.

Neither has Israel forgotten Cyrus.  The Tanakh sings his praises, both in the Prophets and in the Writings.  He was, after all, the one who Isaiah celebrated, who not only liberated the Hebrew people from Babylonian captivity but also bankrolled the rebuilding of Jerusalem.   Nehemiah worked for Cyrus, after all.

Folks in the Middle East have long memories.  It's just a pity those memories are so selective, seeking out the pain and discord and not going back to places of grace and hospitality.  You'd think the fact that the greatest Iranian leader encouraged Jews to rebuild Israel would be something you'd remember.

Not Understanding Zion

The big contentious issue for this year...at least as it's being construed by the conservative and progressive wings in the Presbyterian Church (USA)...goes beyond our usual howling about human sexuality. This year, we're also fighting about the whole Israel/Palestine thing.

On the one hand, you have the leftists in the church, who seem so eager to show solidarity with the oppressed that they'll swallow anything that comes out of the mouths of Palestinians. This includes providing tacit endorsement to statements that equivocate about the morality of suicide bombing and that deny that the Jews who now reside in Israel are actually real Jews.

On the other side, you have the right-wingers who seem to think that Israel can do no wrong, being the Chosen People and all. Fences smack in the middle of communities? Keeps the rabble out. Draconian security? It's necessary. Destroying the houses of the families of those who cause trouble? That'll show 'em. Heck, this is the land that God gave 'em, so they've got a right to do whatever they darn well please. It's right there in the Bible!

Discernment is not really a well developed spiritual skill-set among partisans.

My own struggle with the issue is complex. I have no patience for folks who articulate hatred for Jews. Period. Meaning much of the rhetoric used by Palestinians just makes me angry. Israel as a secular state...meaning, a parlimentary democracy that is comprised primarily of folks who are of Jewish heritage and who speak Hebrew...doesn't trouble me at all.

But when I start thinking about modern day Israel as the theological Zion, as the place of God's promise for the Jewish people, things come apart a bit. Honestly, it doesn't connect with my understanding of the Kingdom in any way, shape, or form. It's a Christian bias, I know, even if it is squarely rooted in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. But the idea of Zion as a place, as a particular patch of land in a particular corner of our little world, that idea is completely alien to my theology.

The idea of Jerusalem as Zion hasn't, quite frankly, had any substantive foundation in the faith since the Babylonians trounced Judah. Jerusalem and the geophysical space we call Israel just aren't the same as Zion. When the prophets speak of Zion, they speak of a utopian reality, a state of being in which not only are the Jewish people living without fear of oppression, but everyone else who recognizes God's intended purpose for us is as well.

That state of being is not limited to a hunk of semi-arable land in the Near East. Way I see it, it manifests itself in any place where the Jewish people...and we Gentiles, too...can live free from fear, oppression, and want. From my own admittedly odd perspective , I see Zion more strongly expressing itself in New York City than I do in the Middle East.

Israel, Palestine, Impartiality and Intractable Conflict

Both of my sons are Jewish, and they as of yet have not visited Israel. One of these days, I want to be able to go there with them. But for pretty much the whole span of my 41 years of life, Israel has not seemed like the sort of place that a responsible parent brings their kids. Brief periods of peace are interspersed with intense paroxysms of violence.

You've got hatreds that go back generations. You've got competing claims on the land. You've got radically different faith perspectives, which weave up into those claims on the land. But it's not just Israel and the Palestinians. You've got a broader situation in the Middle East that is insanely convoluted, in which a significant proportion of the Arab world can barely be grudgingly dragged to admitting Israel has any right to exist at all.

The Holy Land is a total sociopolitical mess. Same as it ever was...

All this adds up to a conflict between parties that every now and again drops from level five to level four, but then pops right back up again, like one of the torments of Tantalus if he'd been a conflict mediation specialist. Worst of all, you have forces on both sides that actively draw their energy from the conflict. They create and feed the tensions as a means of reinforcing their own vision of the world, existing in a dark symbiosis with their counterparts.

In this situation of conflict, my own denomination struggles to find a consistent voice. On our left flank, there are folks who see the oppression of Palestinian Christians and see an opportunity to get all social justicey, just like back in the 60s when they still had hair. They tend to gloss over wrongs inflicted by the "side" they've chosen. On the right, there are those whose theological framework assumes that the existence of Israel is necessary for the return of Christ, and who give theological preference to Jews because...well...it says so in the Bible. They, too, are unwilling to recognize where their "side" may overstep the bounds of justice.

The heat of that struggle has occasionally burned/caught up folks of a Presbyterian ilk...and is in the midst of doing so again. A few years, back, we dabbled with the idea of divestment from military ventures in Israel...and got burned. More recently, some of our more lefty folks have come perilously close to endorsing suicide bombings. It's rocky terrain, and when we venture there, we have trouble maintaining our balance.

At our last General Assembly, Presbyterians of my particular flavor adopted as policy a statement of essential neutrality, and established a commission to take a look at what we could do to further peaceful resolution of the conflict in that region. That's the right approach.

The challenge, of course, is really implementing it. As this commission reaches the point at which it is to make it's report, it's really, really difficult to remain authentically impartial. You know, in the same way that the Maker is impartial.

There are some concerns that the results of the Committee report might be imbalanced. But given that it's not even out yet, I'm still awaiting it. Maybe it'll be even-handed. Maybe it'll skew one way or another. I can't imagine it will be quite as skewed as a recent pre-emptive pronouncement of the Simon Wiesenthal Center would have us believe, though. The Presbyterian Church is "ready to declare war against Israel?" Without even reading a report which has not even been released?

Oy. Level Five is so very predictable.

For me, that desire for an end to tensions isn't just an abstract yearning to do good somewhere, somehow. It goes deeper, because it's about my own flesh and blood. From that, though, I recognize my own stirrings towards imbalance. It's hard to sympathize with folks who reflexively hate your children.

But even in the face of that, I recognize that the intense complexity of the situation on the ground calls for avoiding any and all efforts to paint things in black and white. Because that approach doesn't allow for the intermingling and interchange that is absolutely necessary if any movement towards peace is to be found.

The Inviolability of Israel

American politics is littered with third rails, topics or subjects that can't be broached or addressed in any meaningful way without frying the individual in question.

BZZZZZAP.

I think that was recent nominee for a senior intelligence position.

That highly electrified rail is the complex relationship between the United States and Israel.

On the one hand, Israel is a parliamentary democracy. It's an essentially free state in a region that is defined by monarchies, despots, and repressive theocracies. It has every right to exist, and exist in peace. It is also a reliable and natural ally for our constitutional democracy.

On the other hand, Israel is a nation state, with all of the flaws and foibles that exist in such entities. It is not perfect, any more than the United States...or any of us individually...is perfect.

After it's most recent election, Israel now is governed by what may prove to be an unusually truculent coalition of nationalists and ultra-nationalists. Given the ongoing provocations by Hamas, the results of the recent election were predictable. Human beings who perceive themselves as under attack will always seek hardliners to protect them, and Israelis are no exception.

Their new foreign minister, for instance, is an ultraconservative supporter of the expansion of settlements, who views any suggestion of negotiations with Israel's opponents as evidence of treason. He supports the institution of mandatory loyalty oaths for Israelis, to the point at which he's at odds with some of the ultra-orthodox, who view this as a violation of Torah. Their new prime minister is a hard core hawk, and one of the architects of the ill-conceived wars in Lebanon in the 1980s. Take this cadre of leaders, add in the militants on the other side of the equation who need conflict to justify their existence, and the odds are good that things will at some point get messy. Or rather, messier.

The challenge, of course, is that many folks have a great deal of difficulty "supporting Israel" if that support requires every Israeli action to be a priori correct. In the United States, those views are largely held by American conservative Christians, whose attitudes towards Israel are governed by a strangely warped biblicism. Using a few verses of scripture picked out of context, suddenly even speaking a word of concern about Israel becomes forbidden. Israel is God's Country! You can't say anything bad about the Land of the Promise! At least, not until after Jesus comes back, at which point they'll all either bow down before him or go to hell.

This is particularly strange given where the Bible stands on the subject. Pretty much the entire prophetic literature is filled with invective against Israel and Judah. God is endlessly pissed off at the stubbornness of His Chosen People, and does a fair amount of kicking their butts. That doesn't break the covenant, mind you. He still loves 'em. But when they step away from covenant and/or become tools of injustice, they are not above being held to account. As far as God is concerned, Zion is not inviolable.

The challenge, of course, is how to articulate a concern for justice without seeming to threaten the integrity of that often embattled democratic state. Progressives and liberals in the U.S. generally do a pretty crappy job of this, falling into rhetoric that only alienates them from the very folks they're trying to influence. My own denomination has managed to do a pretty clumsy job of it, alternating between open dialogue and destructive invective.

Not sure the way out of this one...but it's a serious conundrum.